Sketchpad Explorer

Price:  Free

Purpose/Capabilities: 

Based on The Geometer’s Sketchpad software, the Sketchpad Explorer app allows you to interact with and investigate any document created in Sketchpad, allowing students to have hands-on experiences for investigating a variety of different concepts.  The teacher can create their own document using Geometer’s Sketchpad on their computer, or there is a large variety of pre-made materials available to use.  The students can then drag, manipulate, and animate the document to develop generalizations of the different mathematical concepts they are studying.

Geometer’s Sketchpad and Sketchpad Explorer are not only for Geometry related topics.  It is great for investigating elementary mathematics, algebraic concepts (such as slope, functions, understanding variables), trigonometry (unit circle, sine and cosine values and graphs, polar graphs and complex numbers), and calculus (limits, derivatives, and integrals). 

Positive Aspects: 

Sketchpad Explorer is a great, free way for students to visually see mathematical concepts in action by generalizing what happens when the visual is manipulated in different ways.  The app has a getting started tutorial that is helpful in learning the ins and outs of what the app is capable of.  It has several networked documents that can easily be accessed through the app.  This includes elementary mathematics, geometry constructions, ellipse constructions, dynagraphs, and slope.  It also has a link to the website for the app, which has many more already made activities to use in your classes that can easily be downloaded.  If you want to use this in your classes, you can save the document and upload it to your website/wiki.  Once the document is saved, students can access it at any time and refer back to what they learned.   Most of the documents take only seconds/minutes for the students to manipulate in order to make these generalizations.

Negative Aspects: 

Sketchpad Explorer was, for me, one of the more difficult apps to intuitively figure out how to use, at least initially.  However, once you have the documents already there, it is very easy to manipulate them to show the different concept.  It takes a decent amount of time creating different documents from scratch, but there are so many already made ones that this may not be necessary.